PARIS LETTER/Lara MarloweRachid Ramda figured prominently in the charge sheet read out yesterday in the Paris assize court, but Mr Ramda wasn't here. With two Algerian co-defendants, he stands charged of complicity in three bombings that killed eight people and wounded 200 in the French capital in 1995.
To the fury of 182 civil plantiffs - some of them disabled - Mr Ramda has resisted French attempts to extradite him from Belmarsh prison in England for seven years. He has an excellent lawyer, Ms Gareth Peirce, who gained fame in cases involving Irish people wrongly accused in Britain, including the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
In the wake of September 11th, the British Home Secretary, Mr David Blunkett, recommended that Mr Ramda be sent to France for trial. Yet on June 27th, the London High Court requested "a new evaluation taking account of the security of the accused in the hands of French authorities". In other words, British judges don't trust French policemen not to beat up or torture Mr Ramda.
In the Palais de Justice, the ruling was called "degrading, inadmissible, shameful"; a monumental slap in the face. Rumours circulate of a non-aggression pact between British authorities and Islamists, or extremists working as double agents for Scotland Yard.
The French Minister of Justice, Mr Dominique Perben, has expressed his "impatience" at Britain's failure to extradite Mr Ramda. The magistrate and National Assembly deputy Mr Alain Marceau, who established the "anti-terrorist" unit at the Palais de Justice in 1986, yesterday said it was "totally scandalous" that Mr Ramda was not present for the opening of the trial.
Mr Marceau promised to travel to London with three fellow deputies "to explain to those responsible that if they continue to treat France - and especially the families of victims - as they are treated today, it will be a veritable casus belli."
The problem started with tell-tale bruises on the body of Boualem Bensaid, Mr Ramda's co-defendant, after his arrest and interrogation in November 1995. Police said Mr Bensaid resisted arrest. But after initially confessing - and incriminating Mr Ramda - Mr Bensaid retracted his testimony. In a separate case, France was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for torture.
In 1999 and 2000, Mr Bensaid was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for "membership in a terrorist organisation" and planning the (failed) bombing of the Lyons-Paris TGV in August 1995. Algerian extremists planted six bombs in Paris in 1995, and Mr Bensaid and Smain Ait Ali Belkacem - already sentenced to 10 years in prison - will stand trial over the next month for three of the attacks.
The home-made bombs were of the type used by the GIA in Algeria: cooking gas canisters filled with gun powder, nails, nuts and bolts, with an alarm clock for a timer. In the careful accounts he kept, Mr Bensaid listed nuts and bolts under the heading "sweets". His fingerprint was found on a piece of tape stuck to a fragment of the bomb that wounded 13 people near the Maison Blanche metro station on October 6th, 1995. Mr Belkacem's reusable carte orange metro ticket showed that he left a suburban commuter train on October 17th, 1995, minutes before a bomb exploded on the same train between the Musée d'Orsay and Saint Michel stations, wounding 19 people.
In Mr Ramda's absence, his trial has been postponed. But the evidence against him - much of it collected by Scotland Yard in his apartment - was cited in detail: subscriptions to three telephone numbers frequently called by the other accused; numerous documents addressed to Elyas, Elias or Eleyes, pseudonyms used by the alleged bombers' London contact; a statement issued by Djamel Zitouni, the head of the GIA; the ultimatum sent to President Jacques Chirac in August 1995, ordering him to convert to Islam; the cover of the GIA's London-based publication, Al-Ansar, bearing a drawing of the Eiffel Tower exploding and forming the symbol of the GIA - found before the news-sheet had been distributed. The receipt for a cash transfer of 36,800.30 francs sent from Wembley to Mr Bensaid in Paris on October 16th 1995 - the eve of the Musée d'Orsay train bombing - bore Mr Ramda's fingerprints. Ms Peirce has argued that there is anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bias in France, that French media coverage and official statements preclude Mr Ramda receiving a fair trial here. But 182 victims now fear that the European Court of Human Rights may order Britain to free Mr Ramda on the grounds that he has been held too long without trial.
The European arrest warrant, announced after September 11th, is non-existent, and France and Britain are squabbling over custody of Mr Ramda. No one, it seems, can strike a balance between the rights of the accused and the right to justice.